Company Sergant Major Martin Doyle
1st Battalion, Royal Munster Fusiliers
(1891 – 1940)
Riencourt, France – September 2nd, 1918:
What would come to be known as the final 100 Days of the war had begun, and the British were staging a major offensive to push the Germans back.
CSM Doyle personally led a charge against the Germans to rescue his men, and carried a wounded officer back to safety.
When a British tank was being swarmed by Germans, Doyle single-handedly knocked the enemy out of the fight. When a machine gun began firing on the tank, Doyle took it upon himself to capture the crew for that gun (1).
The London Gazette, in their announcement of Doyle’s V.C. win, stated he showed a “total disregard for danger”(2).
Double Action:
Following the war, Doyle participated in numerous V.C. and British Army related events.
In 1920, the British government designated the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. As a Victoria Cross holder, Doyle was part of the ceremonial Guard of Honour that interned their fallen comrade among kings.
Following World War I, the Irish War of Independence broke out. Doyle enlisted as an intelligence officer in the IRA for the duration of the war. He would now be fighting the British Army, which he had served in less than two years prior. It was even reported that he was
“providing the [Irish] Volunteers with ‘information’ while working in the Ennis military barracks” (3)
When the Civil War broke out in 1922, he once again enlisted in the Irish Army, and rose to become a company sergeant.
A major cause for this change would be the Easter Uprising, which changed the public perception of Irishmen in the British Army. Hostility to Irishmen fighting for the King increased in Dublin during the later years of the war. One soldier even noted “No local girl [in Dublin] dared walk the streets with a man in uniform.”(4) These conditions led to loyal men like Martin Doyle joining the I.R.A. after the war.
The duality of his service, to both the British and the Irish, provides for conflicting memories of Doyle to both nations.
(1). Richard Doherty and David Truesdale, Irish Winners of the Victoria Cross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 135-136.
(2). “No. 10864 C.S.M. Martin Doyle, M.M., 1st Bn., R. Muns. Fus. (New Ross, Co. Wexford),” The London Gazette, January 31, 1919, accessed December 4, 2016, https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/31155/supplement/1504.
(3). Desmond Bowen and Jean Bowen, Heroic Option: The Irish in the British Army (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2005), 284.
(4). Bowen and Bowen, Heroic Option, 245.
Further Reading:
Nicholas Allen, “Cultural representations of 1916,” in Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, The Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland, ed. Richard S. Grayson et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 178.